“PBJ nightmares”

Thursday morning dawned and as usual I was wide awake at five am. I dressed silently, so as not to waken my roommates, and slid down to the kitchen. This was the day we were taking the orphans from Brydges to the park, which meant lots of sandwiches had to be made before we could leave.

I thought, here is something I can do to help out the team. And you would think, seeing as I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch every day for 20 years, that this would be an easy task for me. Wrong. This was Kenya and nothing was the same as at home.

The plan was to make the sandwiches and slide them back into the bread bags. The problem with that idea was that the bread bags didn’t come closed with twist ties or even the square plastic thingy with the hole in it. No, they were sealed with a piece of tape, which once torn could not be reused.

Having raised a boy scout, I tried to always be prepared. I snuck back up to the room and dug out a roll of medical tape I had packed in my suitcase. So as not to misplace it, I tied it on my person via the drawstring on my skirt.

The next problem was that I could not anywhere in the kitchen find a can opener and the jelly came in big sealed cans. I finally dug a can opener out of the bottom of some junk drawer, but it worked so poorly that I thought I would have better luck opening the can with my teeth. I managed to cut half of the lid off and just bent it back enough to reach in with my knife.

Then there was the peanut butter. Remember the Eljoy peanut butter project? I told you I would revisit that. The peanut butter at room temperature spread more like it had just come out of the freezer. It took some practice to get it to stay on the bread in a layer instead of as a little lump and without ripping the bread up.

I had hoped to have a lot accomplished by the time the rest of the adults from the team started wandering into the kitchen around six am. Instead I think I might have had one bag of sandwiches ready to go.